Periodic closet purges are OK, but hanging on has pluses, too

What I am about to suggest may shock you.

Don’t get rid of all that stuff you never wear in your closet.

I know what you’re thinking: What in the name of Marie Kondo can she be thinking?

Put aside your copy of Kondo’s best- selling The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and consider the thoughts I comforted myself with after my humiliating defeat at the hands of my closet.

What are my arguments against an all-out closet purge?

1. My short pink cotton jacket.

It was a beloved stalwart of my wardrobe for years. But time passed; my love faded; my husband pronounced it hideous; and so during a closet purge a few years ago, I donated it to charity.

I miss that jacket on a regular basis. It was the perfect antidote to summer air conditioning — more summery and interesting than a sweater, and in a color that went with everything. 2. My wedding sandals. If you haven’t worn something for a year, the conventional wisdom goes, get rid of it because you’ll never wear it again.

But consider the tale of the sandals I wore at my wedding.

They were plain white sandals with a low block heel. I kept them out of sentimentality, but didn’t wear them.

Until this summer, when I came upon them in a closet.

Sandals with low block heels? This year they were the height, so to speak, of fashion.

I wore them with a cocktail dress to a wedding.

After not wearing them for 32 years.

3. Shopping your closet.

This time-honored strategy is a great way to get new, but not really, clothes.

But it only works if you have a closet so stuffed that you can’t find things and you forget about them — and then find them years later.

That severely edited closet is not a place where you can someday find surprises. If you purge your closet, you can’t shop it.

That lean closet still sounds like a calm-inducing ideal. But maybe we can find another kind of calm by relinquishing some of the fantasy and making peace with reality.

Go ahead and “Kondo” your home, in the parlance of the fans of the Japanese de-cluttering expert, if you can.

But if you can’t, credit yourself with extreme foresight. Look how shrewd you are — you can see what you might want to wear in 32 years.